He pours scorn on the temper tantrum being thrown by the Vote Leave camp because ITV have invited UKIP leader Nigel Farage to oppose David Cameron in their set piece EU Referendum debate. He also has the audacity to suggest Farage would do better than Boris or Gove…

It’s not as if Nigel Farage isn’t a good media performer or doesn’t know the arguments. In fact, I’d say he’s a far better performer in debates than either Boris Johnson or Michael Gove would necessarily be.

Naturally this goes against the grain of the currently accepted narrative that Marmite Nige turns off as many people as he turns on. How could he possibly cope against the smooth as silk double glazing salesman that is Dave?

But hark back to 2010. Dave’s failure to achieve an overall majority and his need to swallow the bitter pill of a coalition with the Lib Dems is often put down to his failure to outsmart Nick Clegg in a TV debate. Clegg became the SuperDebateMan and the bruised Dave steered clear of repeating the format in 2015.

Yet who was it who crushed SuperDebateMan Clegg in two widely broadcast debates on the EU just two years ago?

Nigel Farage triumphed in the second television debate on Europe by a clear-cut 69% to 31%, an instant poll showed, suggesting that a more emotional but often overscripted Nick Clegg failed to convince viewers that Ukip is selling the British people a “dangerous con” and a “fantasy”.

The Guardian/ICM findings after the BBC2 debate were almost exactly matched by a separate YouGov poll for the Sun, showing that in a sometimes brutal debate, with both men accusing the other of lying, it was the Ukip leader who came out ahead by an even bigger margin than a week earlier.

Yet a year later in a TV match up with SNP, PC and Greens he didn’t do well at all. He scored a pathetic own goal by linking health tourism with Aids and became very bad tempered with the audience. This was not the confident operator of the Clegg Debates or a score of BBCQT appearances where he had overcome hostile audiences with a good grasp of facts and a sense of humour.

Some blamed campaign exhaustion. Others sensed ill health. But many squarely placed the blame on Nigel’s campaign guru and right hand man at the time, BreitbartUK editor Raheem Kassam who, it has been claimed, advised Farage to go “shock and awe”. With Kassam’s guidance Farage not only was marginalised in the 2015 TV debate but he also failed to win a constituency that had earlier appeared to be “in the bag” for UKIP.

So, yes, Iain Dale, Farage is a good media performer. There’s no reason why he couldn’t do a Clegg on Cameron as well – but only if the loose cannon that is Raheem Kassam is locked firmly in a box for the duration.

An ice cold bucket of cold water from Roger Helmer MEP over the claim by government minister and former George Osborne bagman Matthew Hancock MP that Brexit would be a “leap in the dark” and lead to a decade of uncertainty – so therefore there is really no safe and sensible alternative to being shackled to the zombie EU.

The alternative to being in the EU is not being in the EU. And far from being a mystery, it is in fact the current state of a hundred-plus countries around the world – most of whom are doing rather better, in economic terms, than the declining and dysfunctional EU. It is the state that Britain was in for centuries before we joined the “Common Market” less than half a century ago. I don’t think that many Canadians or Australians or Singaporeans wake up in the morning scared to death because their countries are independent and not in the EU.

For the benefit of Mr. Hancock, let me set out the parameters of Britain post-Brexit. We shall have a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU, and contrary to the government’s scare story, that will involve negotiation not “with 27 member-states” but with just one interlocutor – the EU itself.

But imagine a worst case, where we failed to negotiate an FTA. Then, as Matt Hancock knows perfectly well (or ought to know), the default position is simply the WTO rules. Arm’s-length trading on a WTO basis would be less advantageous that an FTA – but not much. For example, the duties payable on our exports to the EU under the Common External Tariff would be less than half our current net contributions to the EU budget. Dozens of countries around the world trade perfectly well with the EU on WTO terms. The three largest external suppliers into the EU are China, Russia and the USA. None of these has an FTA with the EU, but they trade with it very successfully nonetheless.

A brave attempt once more by Daniel Hannan to remind us that, at a time when the monarchies of Europe were successfully suffocating their own nascent representative institutions, the attempts by Charles I and his cohorts to do the same to the English Parliament by invoking the divine right of kings was finally broken in Yorkshire in the summer of 1644. The Battle of Marston Moor did not end the English Civil War between King and Parliament but it fatally weakened the Royalist forces.

As Hannan points out, although there were bumps along the way, the sovereignty of Parliament as the source of authority remained unchallenged for well over three hundred years until 1973.

Parliament remained sovereign until 1 January 1973, when Sections 2 and 3 of the 1972 European Communities Act came into effect, giving EU law primacy over British law

For centuries the idea that our freedom was deeply embedded in our past was part of the warp and weft of the upbringing of each English generation

Some of the men who won the day at Marston Moor would have pointed at Henry VIII’s break with Rome, others at Magna Carta. Yet others would have gone back still further, to the folkright of Anglo-Saxon common law that had constrained kings before 1066.

Today that key aspect of our history is largely ignored. To his credit Hannan has vividly brought it back to life with his book “How We Invented Freedom & Why It Matters”

The pity is, however, that he still feels that the shame of 1973 can be resolved by negotiation within the confines of the EU – which is why he stays within the Tory party and remains a loyal follower of David Cameron. Until he realises that the permanent surrender of national sovereignty is the very keystone of the EU edifice and its removal would render the whole enterprise worthless Hannan must be regarded as an interesting but essentially unreliable observer.

Regular Daily Telegraph pundit Peter Oborne pens a worrrying piece about the impact on the social fabric of Britain after January 1st when Romanians and Bulgarians, as citizens of the EU, will have unrestricted access to the UK.

The new migrants will be hungry for jobs, and are bound to price some British workers out of the market. They will have the right to use our schools and NHS, which are already creaking. They will need housing, and welfare benefits.

Business leaders will love that for lowering labour costs. The middle classes will also welcome the prospect of even cheaper servants

But there is a cost to the social fabric, and it is always the poor and powerless who pay the highest price.

Precisely

Oborne talks about how Cameron, Miliband and other leading politicians need to have the courage to stand up to the EU and develop a strategy to make access far more difficult.

The moral case for such drastic action is very strong. Despite tentative signs of recovery, Britain still faces an economic emergency. Nearly one million young people, almost 20 per cent of the labour force under 25, are out of work. Some of their jobs would surely go to the new Eastern European migrants. Mr Cameron should argue that this is a situation no civilised government can tolerate.

Only Greer called the X word out to Diane James. Soubry used the S word to Nigel Farage. Both did it on BBC Question Time. But not to a highly “respected” media pundit like Oborne but to James and Farage because they belonged to UKIP.

Oddly enough Oborne doesn’t mention UKIP at all in his piece (quelle surprise) which is strange because there is nothing original in his article….UKIP has been saying exactly the same for several years.

“Let’s have a debate about immigration” is politics speak for “I am about to fob you off with meaningless blather and pretend that something can be done.”

Always beware of politicians who call for a “debate” about an issue. What they really mean is a series of carefully orchestrated statements from key figures within the Westminster bubble. The one thing they do not want to hear about is anything from the great unwashed who live outside that bubble.

Labour’s Yvette Cooper surely had a point today when she said that politicians of all sorts should be more candid about how much – and how little – they can really do on immigration.

She said: “It’s also about being honest with people about what impact you can have and what practical measures there can be, rather than getting into a kind of arms race of rhetoric on immigration, which doesn’t help anybody because they just don’t believe it.”

You see there is absolutely nothing that any British government can do about immigrants from within the EU because we have unilaterally surrendered control of our own borders to Brussels.

There is also nothing we can do about immigrants who arrive here either legally or illegally from outside the EU because we have unilaterally acknowledged the European Court of Human Rights as superior to British courts of law.

So when messrs Cameron, Clegg and Miliband give us “straight talk” about immigration they are simply telling lies – unless they also advocate leaving the EU…

The Telegraph goes all BBC and pimps up a “survey” about small businesses opposing a UK exit from the EU without saying much about the source

“Almost two thirds of the 1,600 companies surveyed by SME networking business BNI said staying in the EU would be better for business”

Fortunately, if you look at the comments you will see that readers expended a little more shoeleather on BNI than the DT

BNI is a networking company (http://www.bni.eu) with just under 6300 members. The survey had 1600 responses, almost two thirds of whom believed Britain would be better off in the EU. So, under 1100 (less than a fifth of BNI’s UK membership) people thought that Britain should stay in the EU. It’s not exactly representative, is it?

This…

would like to know, before giving any credence whatsoever to this ‘survey’:
1) Were any of the sample actual exporters to the EU, if so what percentage
2) What EXACTLY was the question
3) How was the data treated in coming to the ‘results’
4) What do the surveyed firms think the situation will be, as far as exporting and trade is concerned, AFTER a negotiated EU exit.

And This..

I always thought that SMEs in this country were represented by the BCC, whose attitude to the EU and its reams of regulation is markedly less enthusiastic. And of course, there are far more SMEs in the UK (like mine) which do not belong to any trade organisation at all because we consider them to be a waste of money and representative of vested interests that run entirely counter to our own business interests
That this ‘survey’ has beenn presented without reference to such essential background information about the participants makes one conclude that standards at The Telegraph have really slipped, particularly with regard to the misleading headline, since it cannot possibly claim to speak for a majority of UK SMEs

They really think we are stupid. They believe their own agitprop that the the surge of support for UKIP is just a nine day wonder, a brief blip of protest that will disappear as the spin merchants and their media pimps attempt to switch the narrative. Tory Chairman Grant Shapps, we are told, has written a letter to local activists. William Hague might soon be wheeled out to assure the doubtful that all is well. Samantha Cameron should make herself available to secure the female vote.

They hold us in contempt – but they are rattled. Keep up the pressure and we can beat them.

Pictured above are (from l to r), former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, Herman Van Rompuy (President of the EU Council) and Jose Manuel Barroso (President of the EU Commission) at a China/EU summit held a few months ago.

What does each of them have in common? They represent the leadership of two powerful global economic blocs that wield power over millions of people.

What else? They reached their positions of power, not through election by millions of their fellow citizens but via a secretive cabal of a select few – the higher echelon of the Communist Party in Wen’s case and the Heads of State in the EU for the other two.

In other words none of them were mandated by their people via the ballot box. They were essentially selected by their own fellow oligarchs who regard themselves as the elite who deserve to rule rather than submit themselves to whims of the great unwashed.

Indeed Barroso (a Maoist revolutionary in his Portuguese student days) has been quoted as fully supportive of that elite notion.

Governments are not always right. If governments were always right we would not have the situation that we have today. Decisions taken by the most democratic institutions in the world are very often wrong.

Ah, the government of the experts or, as Thomas Sowell called them, The Anointed, so much cleverer than the voting masses who do not have the brains to understand the complexities of thw world’s problems…

Really?

Voters, being human, can make mistakes. But it doesn’t follow that a class of experts would have made a better decision. Just think about some of the positions that “the experts” have taken down the ages. In the 1920s, they were for returning to gold at the pre-war rate. In the 1930s, they were for appeasement. In the 1940s, they were for nationalisation. In the 1950s they were for state planning. In the 1960s, they were for mixed-ability, child-centred teaching. In the 1970s, they were for price controls. In the 1980s, they were for the ERM. In the 1990s they were for the euro. In our own decade, they were for the bail-outs and stimulus packages.